Velodyne ROS Stack

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Johann Weichselbaum

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Jan 11, 2012, 7:13:16 AM1/11/12

to utexas-art-ros-pkg-users

Hello,

I'm currently working on a project with a Velodyne HDL 32E and I'm
trying to run it with your Velodyne ROS stack.

My first question:

Is it possible to select the input source (e.g. eth4) when calling
"rosrun velodyne_common read", because I didn't find anything about
that.

My second question:

The configuration file for the Velodyne HDL 32E is a *.xml file. As
you describe in the ROS-Wiki the default configuration file is called
angles.config and I wonder how this is formatted. Can you please give
me some information about that or send me an example configuration
file of your HDL 64?

Thank you for your help!

Best wishes,
Johann

Jack O'Quin

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Jan 12, 2012, 3:23:42 PM1/12/12

to johann.we...@gmail.com, Ryan Gariepy, utexas-art-r...@googlegroups.com, Piyush Khandelwal, Jorge Martin-de-Nicolas

Johann, Ryan:

Both of your messages came in the last day or so. Thanks for your
interest in the Velodyne driver.

Responding to both messages together (below):

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 6:13 AM, Johann Weichselbaum
<johann.we...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm currently working on a project with a Velodyne HDL 32E and I'm
> trying to run it with your Velodyne ROS stack.
>
> My first question:
>
> Is it possible to select the input source (e.g. eth4) when calling
> "rosrun velodyne_common read", because I didn't find anything about
> that.

The driver just listens on UDP port 2368. It does not care what
Ethernet interface the data come from. Our device is connected via
eth1, but that should not matter.

Does your device use a different UDP port? If so, we can make that a parameter.

> My second question:
>
> The configuration file for the Velodyne HDL 32E is a *.xml file. As
> you describe in the ROS-Wiki the default configuration file is called
> angles.config and I wonder how this is formatted. Can you please give
> me some information about that or send me an example configuration
> file of your HDL 64?

There's a line for each laser with positional parameters. That's what
Velodyne supplied with those earlier models. The HDL-64E has seven
values per line:

index, rotational, vertical, offset1, offset2, offset3, enabled

The HDL-64E S2 has two more fields:

index, rotational, vertical, offset1, offset2, offset3, vertCorr,
horzCorr, enabled

The actual file for our 64E device is in "velodyne_common/etc/angles.config".

Ryan Gariepy wrote:
> I'm looking for contact information for Jack O'Quin. We have a
> Velodyne HDL-32E here and are looking to get the stack working
> with it. Comms are OK, but it would be helpful if you could provide
> the conversion between the Velodyne db.xml file and the
> angles.config file the ROS node uses.

I would like to add 32E support to the existing driver. If one or both
of you would send me a copy of your XML configuration file, we can
work together to figure out the best way to add that support.

I suspect other modifications will be needed since the 32E has fewer
lasers, but nothing too difficult.

The code for this driver is still evolving, based on past experience.
Specifically, we are moving away from the velodyne_common/RawScan
message in favor of the more flexible velodyne_msgs/VelodyneScan
message, with a timestamp for each packet.